Character assistant: a serious game to practice the comprehension and construction of texts in children with linguistic fragility

Margherita Orsolini
Department of Psychology of developmental and socialization processes, Sapienza University of Rome.

Vindicio Deplano
Psychologist and e-learning consultant

Children of migrants who have acquired Italian in the school context are particularly exposed to a fragile development of linguistic skills, albeit to a highly variable extent depending on the period spent in Italy. Given that the quantity and quality of linguistic input received during participation in daily life activities strongly influences linguistic development (Merz et al., 2019), children with a history of sequential bilingualism (exposure to only one language in early childhood, learning a second language at a later age) may have subtle difficulties with activities, such as understanding and producing texts, that involve complex linguistic skills (Bonifacci and Tobia, 2016).
The serious game Character Assistant offers a series of game exercises that primary school children with frail linguistic development can practice at home, after an initial familiarization in a laboratory at school. Each serious game, starting from a video clip taken from an animated film, presents a sequence of activities that stimulate the understanding and construction of texts, involving visual attention skills, semantic-lexical interpretation, narrative memory, telling a story and other skills linguistics.

In the in-depth section (bottom) it is possible to view the four modules that were developed with the contribution of the excellence project.

Bibliographic reference for those interested in learning more about the hypotheses with which the serious game was built:
Orsolini, M., Deplano, V (2020) Assistente personaggi: un serious game per praticare la comprensione e costruzione di testi in bambini con fragilità linguistiche In C. Cecchinato & V. Grion (2020) Dalle Teaching Machines al Machine Learning (p.173-180). Padova: CLEUP